Kosuke groaned as he awoke. It was a slow process, like waking after a perfect sleep, only there was no comfort here. There was pain and cold and wetness and many pieces of pebbly smoothness.

His back felt… numb.

Sounds bombarded him from above. At first, he thought they were birds, but they coalesced, first into voices. Fearful voices. Panicked voices. Then the voices coalesced into words.

They were crying his name. They cried each others’ names. They cried and cried and cried. They were lost, in need of rescue, and no one was there.

Then everything clicked and Kosuke was up and alert. The first thing he did was scream, and Kosuke instantly regretted it.

His scream wasn’t human, at least, it wasn’t the kind of sound any human would make. It was hardly even a scream. No, it was a roar.

The voices above cried out in terror.

“What the fuck was that?!” Hana screamed.

Kosuke sat up and looked up.

The bus was impaled by one of the grand branches of a forked ginkgo tree, with its roof against the ravine wall and its axel-studded underbelly facing the sky. The tree itself was huge, growing up from almost the very bottom of the ravine. The front of the bus rested atop the tree’s central fork, maybe twenty meters off the ground, directly overhead. Two bodies and many belongings spilled out from where the rest of the bus’ windshield had broken open. Blood trickled down the wood and onto the pebbly earth.

It couldn’t have been real. Kosuke knew he should have been dead. Yet, he wasn’t.

I…

He didn’t know what to think.

Numbly, Kosuke surveyed his surroundings.

The bottom of Fire Valley Gorge was a geological potpourri. Gravel, silt, and water-smoothed stones lined the dark riverbed. The current was little more than a stream running through the central pebbly section of the earth, slicked with moisture from the river’s flow. The ravine’s steep walls rose up on either side like the maw of a giant beast; the maple and ginkgo were its teeth, swathed in arboreal flames. The sky was turning to grape-wine between those rocky jaws, letting the stars shine through all the more brightly. By some miracle, the bus’ internal and external lights were still working, though there was no knowing how long they’d last—though both headlights were totally shot. Moriko’s belongings had fallen with him, and—by another miracle—had managed to survive, though the phone’s screen was cracked.

The water from the river had begun to soak into Kosuke’s pants. The cold feeling snapped him back to focus. With a nod of his head, he crawled out of the bus’ luminous shadow, across the smooth stones, stopping only when the rocks were dry beneath his palms.

How am I still alive?

Kosuke still felt the… heat. It was as if his body was wound up. There was a tightness in his chest that thrummed with his breaths.

He stopped.

The more he thought about it, the stranger he felt. There was a weight on his back that shouldn’t have been there. His feet felt… wrong. It was like he’d stubbed his toes and they’d swollen up ten times their size, only without the throbbing pain.

The fall should have broken his bones. His back and ribs and shoulder blades should have all been shattered to pieces. But they weren’t. And, even if by some third miracle, he had managed to survive the fall, he should have been at the very precipice of death. Instead, he felt eerily alert, almost wired. Everything was… heightened. His sight was sharper. His hearing was more acute. He’d almost go so far as to say he’d never felt better, even though that made no sense. It was like energy was being poured into his being from somewhere unseen—somewhere far, far away—fueling a furnace that roared in his belly and thrummed through his limbs.

Kosuke saw the globe of translucent, swirling light glistening in the distance. It followed him as he crawled across the ground, moving so that he was always at its center.

Kosuke’s ears wiggled at the sound of a woodpecker hammering into a tree

Wiggled?

The boy reached up to touch his ears, but then stopped as he saw his hands.

He didn’t scream. He was too afraid to scream.

His hands had… changed. The backs were covered in rugged, dull beige scales. Flipping his hands around showed that his palms had thickened, with brownish padding bubbled up from them like blisters. Ivory claws had begun to emerge from beneath his fingernails, and the littlest fingers on both his hands were nowhere to be found. And his just palms alone were as large as his feet.

His eyes continued downward.

His limbs were thick. A giant’s limbs. And then he saw his feet. His shoes! The things were covered in absurd bulges, and only when Kosuke’s eyes made contact with them did he realize how much his feet hurt. They were cramped beyond belief. Then he tried to wiggle his toes, and the material ripped open.

He whispered. “Wh-what’s happening to me…?” But the words came out as something in between a purr and a growl.

As Kosuke looked around in a growing panic, his eyes caught light glinting off the ground. Rising to his feet, Kosuke approached it, and then quickened his pace when he saw it was one of the bus’ side-view mirrors. The disk-shaped mirror lay on the stone, on its side. No doubt, it had landed there after breaking off during the fall.

Walking revealed more wrongness. He was taller than he was before, so much that he even felt a brief wave of vertigo sweep through him as he stood. His posture was different.

The weight on his back…

Without thinking, Kosuke reached around to feel what was going on, only for his hands to scrape against something hard and broad and studded in spikes that had torn clear through his school uniform.

Kosuke rushed up to the mirror and went down on his knees and grabbed it and held it up in front of his face as soon as it came within reach.

What Kosuke saw shouldn’t have been possible.

First… he was big. At least three meters tall; perhaps even four. And he looked like a bodybuilder. Muscles and bone pressed up against his clothes, which looked almost comically small on his augmented frame.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

His face.

The monster he saw in the mirror copied Kosuke’s every motion as it—as he—reached to touch his face.

He was growing fur. Golden, like the ginkgo leaves. It poked out from beneath his collar and his jacket’s cufflinks and from his legs where his socks and pants had ridden up on him. Sprigs of it came out from his neck; dull, cyan scales were slowly encroaching his face, encrusting his cheeks. At the sides of the top of his head, pallid, corkscrewed horns rose out from his tidy black hair at a low angle. And when he patted his hands on his chest, he felt something hard; a surface of bony body armor stretched against the inside of his badly strained shirt.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

What’s… what’s happening to me?

Was he turning into an oni? Could that even happen to a person?

His blood quickened, shivering through his veins as it thrummed with power. It was like his organs were fusion reactors, pumping him full of strength that he shouldn’t have had. And, somehow, he knew that this was just an iota of what he could do. He felt as if he could reach out and touch the surface of the Moon if he wanted to. The power just needed to be unlocked.

But he had no idea how.

Above, Hajime yelled. “Look! There it is again! That light! I saw it right before Kosuke fell!”

“Hajime!” Kosuke shouted, only to cover his mouth with his bestial palm.

Kosuke’s voice was as deep as his father’s. It didn’t sound right in his throat. It didn’t feel right, either. Even his breathing seemed different. His chest had deepened and his neck had thickened. His breaths seemed to resonate in his throat.

“K-Kosuke!?” Moriko shrieked.

Kosuke cleared his throat, and then tried again. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He managed to mimic his normal voice by putting on a falsetto. But it was just a deception, and a rather poor one, at that.

“Call me Awakened!” Koji yelled, “He’s alive! He’s alive!”

“Holy shit!” Hiro yelled. “Kosuke? H-How!? How is this possible?”

“H-He’s a rock-climber,” Hajime said, sounding equal parts ecstasy and terror. “He knows how to fall right. I…”

“There is no way to fall right!” Osamu yelled. “He should be dead! He should be dead!!”

“I’m sorry for doubting you, buddy,” Hajime said. “I should have believed in you. I believe in you now. I… I just…” He cried. “I don’t want to die alone.”

It was Hajime.

“Yeah,” Kosuke replied, taking a deep breath, “I’m f—”

—But Kosuke’s deep breath didn’t stop. Yells shot out from the bus as the sphere of light brightened and grew, swelling to encompass much of the vehicle. Things seemed to bend and distort slightly at the edge of the sphere—as if viewed through a lens.

“No!” Kosuke yelled in panic, his falsetto dropped mid-sentence. “Please! No!”

His voice deepened. The sense of heat and power returned, flooding his body. The light-sphere grew more. It doubled. It tripled.

Kosuke shuddered and gagged. It was like a foul elixir had been forced down his throat, setting off an impossible chain reaction. From out of nowhere, might pumped into him, making his body bristle and tingle. His own skin constricted him. A terrible pressure built inside him, raging to break out—a feeling like a sanguine beast, drunk on its own power. It made Kosuke’s every hair stand on end. In another time and place, it might have been rapture, but here and now, he just wanted it to stop.

Once again, Kosuke was changing, only this time, there wasn’t a fall to make him black out.

Immediately, Kosuke stepped back, getting as far away from the bus as quickly as he could. His clothes ripped as moved. His pants tore at the seat and the sides. His shirt and jacket split at the seams. His shoes popped like popcorn, hefty clawed feet bursting from their confines.

He grew.

His body’s mounting weight pulverized the water-smoothed rocks beneath his padded feet. The mirror steadily shrunk in his hands as claws undermined his fingernails and his fingers thickened and toughed. In mere seconds, the mirror slipped through his fingers and fell to the ground. Tightness wrapped around him like a vise. His back grew heavier and heavier as his spiked turtle shell bulged and spread. His spine twitched and slithered, and his skin itched all over, rising to needle-stabbing intensity at the top of his head and the back of his neck.

The ground fell away, joining Kosuke’s shredding clothes. When he looked down, he saw his chest covered in interlocking bony plates, almost like a turtle’s underbelly, and continued down between his increasingly stocky legs. Golden fur and rugged cyan scales came into view on his arms and legs as his clothes sloughed off. A weight pulled at his lower back and brushed across the slick, wet riverbed.

A tail.

He felt… huge.

And then the earth rumbled.

“Earthquake!” someone screamed.

The trembling ground made Kosuke stumbled. He fell forward, slamming onto the ground, river-worn stones cracking beneath his belly. The blow sent rocks tumbling down to the middle of the stony riverbed.

A horrible sound rent the air, making Kosuke’s ears twitch. He pushed off the ground and looked back.

The tree!

The wood spat and snapped. The grand branching ginkgo toppled over, pulling itself up by its roots, loosing rocks and casting debris into the ravine. The tree’s forked trunk split in two, torn by the bus’ weight. The golden leaves whispered as the trunk fell, and the bus fell with it.

He hardly had any time to react. It didn’t matter that the bus was a club of falling metal, soon to strike the earth. It didn’t matter that Kosuke didn’t feel right on his own two feet, or that his growth was beginning to slow. Without a second thought, Kosuke lunged around, toward the underside of the bus, as if to catch a suicide jumper. He stood there like a sumo wrestler, bracing for the impact.

The bus slammed into him as the tree fell, grazing his head.

There was a crunching sound as something broke. Pain seared the top of Kosuke’s skull. He reared back his head and roared in pain. It was a monstrous sound, and his classmates screamed with the terror of demise, but Kosuke held firm.

As the earth-rumble subsided, Kosuke’s ears twitched at the sound of something hitting the ground, but he didn’t let that distract him. He couldn’t. Kosuke kept his eyes on the bus, gripping it by its sides, as if it was a toppling bookcase. The chassis deformed in his grip, creaking and groaning—but he held firm. His talons scraped along the riverbed, pushed back by the bus’ weight. Kosuke stepped back bit by bit, lowering the bus to the ground in little spurts while keeping his hold on its sides, terrified of jostling the tree and bringing yet more death.

But then his classmates’ words reached his pointed, fuzzy ears.

“Monster!”

“What is that thing!?”

“A… a… barashai?”

“Kaiju! Kaiju!!”

The might and growth blazing through Kosuke’s body suddenly diminished, shrinking away without any warning, contracting into his belly like a smoldered chakra.

The bus started getting bigger. Taller. The unopened emergency exit at the back of the bus crowned over Kosuke’s head as the vehicle cast him into its shadow. The sphere of light shrank, collapsing on itself. Higher the bus’ shadow loomed, and higher still. Kosuke’s heart sunk into his belly. The weight grew impossible. Keeping his grip on both sides threatened to rip his chest in two.

He was getting smaller, and quickly, too.

Shit!

With all his strength, Kosuke pushed off the slick stone and dove to the side. The rocks bit into his arches where the protective scales had thinned away. His talons kicked up silt and dirt. Stone scraped across the monster-boy’s chest as he belly-flopped onto the ground, only to bounce as the bus settled in place, walloping the earth with a mighty thud. The metal croaked. Rocks and gravel rustled as the bus’ wheels settled into place.

As quickly as he could, Kosuke got up off the ground and turned around. For a moment, the only thing he knew was that the bus was right-side up again and in one piece.

He muttered in relief—“oh my god”—as he heard his classmates moan and groan. They weren’t happy, but they were alive. They. Were. Alive.

For a moment, Kosuke forgot himself and saw nothing but the good news. He rushed over to the bus in a burst of spirit and adrenaline. Though he wasn’t as tall as the bus anymore, he was still much taller—and stronger—than he should have been, which made it easier for him to undo the latch on the emergency exit at the bus’ back end and pull the lever and open the door.

He’d always wondered what it would be like to open it.

The door swung open smoothly, and with a pleasing hydraulic hiss, as if its hinges were air. Kosuke’s abnormal height gave him a clear view of the aisle between the seats, and all the horrors the crash had wrought.

Though the corpses of the driver and Yamago-sensei had fallen through when the rest of the windshield had broken, the bodies of his dead classmates still sat in their seats, speared on the ginkgo’s sprawling branches.

Ryota. Saburo. Reika. Saki.

They were mangled and torn open, lacerated by fractured glass and wayward tree branches. And it was a horror to behold. But it was not the greatest horror.

No.

The greatest horror was the look in his classmates’ eyes—that frightened, deer-eyed stare, and twitching that followed it, and the desperate, recoiling movements, and the hideous, thankless screams.